Let me tell you a story.
Let me tell you a love story.
Let me tell you about a time when life was simple and love was not.
Let me tell you about a place, surrounded by sparkling waters, where flowers
bloomed from March until December, where the air was always clean, freshened by
the wind blown in from the sea. This is the place where the moon shone the
brightest and the rays of the sun were filtered by layers of clouds that
seemed to follow it as it moved across the sky, a place where the rain fell
only before sunrise, coming down gently like floating dewdrops to nourish the
plants that grew as plants could only do in paradise. This is the place they
called Bansa.
But only when Maria Elena was smiling. For legend has it that the sky would
darken,
and the winds would be howling,
and the water from the river would swell to flood the village,
and the earth would shake
when she was sad and lonely.
One could only imagine the devastation that would follow should she be angry.
And no one had ever known her to be angry. Yet.
Her eyes changed colors according to her mood from dark to the lightest
violet, like the color of the purple heron that somehow behaved domesticated in
her presence. Her skin was as soft and as white as the cotton from the kapok
trees that dotted the piedmont to the east. Her hair was light, even more so,
bleached almost to a yellow because of her frequent trips to the river where
the water hyacinths would gradually bloom the closer they got to her. Her
beauty was known far and wide, from the marshes of Bunawan, to the north beyond
the volcano island, to Surigao, and back across to the moro province of Lanao.
The village people thought she was an albino but no one dared to call her
"kataw" except one unfortunate brazen, contemptuous stranger from Bohol, who
then suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. That was that day of the night when
a black dog just as suddenly appeared among the karas-karas bushes. The dog had
an idiotic grin, like that of the poor stranger. The young men gathered, killed
the dog, and had it for a "sumsuman." Had they not killed that dog, Maria Elena
would have been displeased, so the village women believed, and the weeks that
followed would have seen some calamity fall upon them.
The village women had known how much Maria Elena affected the forces around
them. The day that they became true believers was when the sea water around
Magallanes turned red and hundreds of small fish floated near the shore, belly
up, dead. That was the very day she started being a woman at the age of
twelve. That night the sky was dark. There was no moon and the stars all but
disappeared. A cloudless, moonless, starless sky. She told Manoy Tomas she was
having cramps and he boiled banaba leaves and placed the poultice on her lower
abdomen which made her feel better. The following morning, on the way to the
Sunday tabo-an, Manoy Tomas saw and swore to all that the banaba tree had grown
double it's height overnight, the leaves shiny and glowing with pride.
Legend has it that Maria Elena was not her father's daughter. The people
believed that she was of the engkanto that inhabited the balete tree that had
surrounded the tower of the old church that used to be the center of the
village. The river changed and has reclaimed the land around the curve and the
church has sunk more than thirty feet into the ground. That tower there was the
only testimony of a flourishing settlement of long ago. A balete had taken it
upon itself to wrap around the tower in a protective embrace.
Legend has it that Maria Elena's mother crossed that part of the river without
asking for permission from the spirit of the tree. Manoy Tomas, good, honest,
a simple man, was away for four weeks on an errand for the parish priest, to
Manila to procure new material for the Lenten religious vestments for the
following season. It was said that she was on her way back from the convento
in Butuan. She was a handsome and strong woman, rowing across the big river on
a small wooden bawoto by herself. She started off from where the acacia trees
jutted over the river bank, paddled across at the narrowest part of the river,
passed the tower but neglected to ask permission to cross or show respect for
the spirits of the balete. That was when the spirit entered her and that was
when Custan said she got impregnated. She was never the same again from that
day and immediately after the girl was born she went into a convulsion, blood
oozing from her mouth, nose, eyes and ears, and other body orifices, never
recovered, and died.
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